13 April 2012
OK, so this one isn’t for the feint-hearted or the weak-stomached. Best to leave your emotions in a jar by your computer, and try and read this with as open a mind as possible. If any of these concepts might offend you: incest, bestiality, cannibalism of corpses or necrophilia, probably best to stop reading now. Or actually, read on. It's good to be challenged.
Recently, a German brother-sister couple asked the European court for the right to a family life. They lost, leading many (including the defence lawyers) asking the question: “What’s wrong with incest?” Here’s what’s wrong with incest: nothing. There are no ethical or moral grounds for condemning two adult, consenting siblings from having sex with one another, so long as adequate contraception is used. So why is it against the law? I’ll justify the moral-ethical bit, but first I’ll try and shoot down a few of your counter-arguments before you can raise them.
The first rebuttal that I would give to incest would be that if two siblings were to have a child, the chances of that child having genetic abnormalities would be much higher than usual. This is obviously addressed in the contraception clause of my formulation. You may counter argue that no form of contraception can provide a 100% chance of non-conception. It’s unlikely that this is really your argument though, as I am sure that you would continue to condemn incest even if one sibling was infertile or sterilised.
Also, the chance of genetic abnormalities is also higher amongst cousins begetting children, and yet this is legal in the UK, and doesn’t carry the same sort of social condemnation as sibling incest. (Cheers, Royal Family. How’s haemophilia working out for you?). This ‘baby-might-have-genetic-problems’ response doesn’t have legs. It’s a rational reason that people cling onto in attempt to justify a non-rational standpoint.
‘Not that irrational’, you may reply… ‘For once you say that it is alright for siblings to sleep with one another given the infertility/contraception caveat, it won’t be long before they do away with the contraception and end up just having children anyway. Then they'll be sharing houses and getting married. You are descending along a slippery slope’. This argument commits the aptly named Slippery-Slope Fallacy. Fallacy means BAD way of arguing. There are lots of reasons that the slippery slope argument is a bad one, and I don’t have the time to go through them here. I may have committed this fallacy in my first post.
When deciding the morality of an act, we have a few choices. We instinctively make ethical decisions, but ethicists aren’t generally concerned with how we do act, they are interested in how we should act.
We can either use a system that takes consequences into account, or a system that lays down unbreakable rules, which must be followed regardless of the outcome. A rule that most people would agree with when making any moral decision is one that every good parent ingrains into their kids from an early age: “Treat others as you yourself would like to be treated.”
Christians call this the ‘Golden Rule’, and Immanuel Kant had a similar rule which he called his ‘Categorical Imperative’. This states that you should always act in a way that you would be happy for all other people to act. So you can’t murder that person that called you a prick, because if it became a universal rule for everybody to murder people when they are called a prick, the world would be a murder-ey place. Either that or the word ‘prick’ would drop out of people’s vocabulary.
This system is obviously not one that you could use to condemn incest. What if all adult consenting siblings suddenly started having sex with their adult consenting siblings? I can’t really see the negative impact on the world. People’s reputations might be damaged, I suppose, but that’s not really an argument. After all, that’s just social pressure based on an irrational prejudice.
You might appeal to an ethical system that takes consequences into account. The most popular ethical system that uses consequences to judge morality is utilitarianism, which traditionally insists that you must follow the principle “Always act in way that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number”. By happiness, it means pleasure, which Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (the founders of the theory) considered to be the same thing.
This system obviously couldn’t be used to defend your disgust at incest either. Incest, if undertaken by two consensual, contraceptive-crazy adults, would actually adhere to this principle.
There is a third main system for making ethical decisions, and that is virtue ethics, which concentrate on you becoming a good person by working on you character. Aristotle was the main guy of this system, and believed that you should try and achieve a good balance between two extremes. So courage is the balance of cowardice and recklessness. You become a ‘good’ person by acting in this way as a matter of habit. It’s difficult to see how this system would condemn incest, because it’s quite a vague system to begin with, and only works with an agreed set of virtues, and an agreed set of definitions for those virtues.
You could appeal to the bible. It does condemn incest in several places. But then your argument would be:
1. The bible is always right in its moral judgements 2. The bible condemns incest 3. Therefore, incest is morally wrong
But the bible is a terrible moral guide. If you get your moral compass from the bible then you have to condemn all sorts of things as well, like homosexuality, having a bank account that charges interest, eating shell-fish and wearing mixed linen and wool clothing (yep, all in the good book). You would also have to advocate slavery and the death penalty. I’m not too worried about a bible counter argument.
It seems that people are mistaking their repulsion for morality. That’s why ethicists call this area the ‘Yuk Factor’. Stuff that we are disgusted by, and so call wrong, but can’t rationally demonstrate exactly why we find it wrong. Could it be that it is simply as social norm that we have had indoctrinated into us, and we find it repulsive because it goes against this norm? This, I would argue, is the sort of repulsion that Nick Griffin sees when he watches two gay men kiss. We berate Griffin because there is no logical, moral or ethical reason to be repulsed by homosexuality.
Although, we can understand that, having only recently grown up and realised this, it may take a generation or two for homosexuality to become a completely socially accepted practice, with nobody being ‘grossed out’ by it. Could the same, in the future, be true of incest?
What's wrong with incest? • Opuss № I